


The Extraction of a Soul and the Archaeology Involved

by Chyme



Category: Fate/EXTRA, Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Genre: Character Death Fix, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Interspecies Romance, Post-Canon, Post-Game(s), Temporary Character Death, for the first one at least
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-05
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2018-10-25 22:29:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 19,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10773789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chyme/pseuds/Chyme
Summary: Tamamo was dead. And also everywhere Hakuno looked.But sometimes, to re-find what has been lost, we must learn to look in different places.[A 'what-if?' scenario following the ending of the first Fate/Extra game]





	1. Awakening

 

Hakuno had woken up to the sight of blue eyes and a persistent voice. It had surprised her that anyone would care enough to come for her; after the bright flare of orange fire that had torn her away from the world, she had been prey to disturbing dreams about darkness and people who crumbled into it like they were made of paper instead of flesh.

‘Really?’ she asked her saviour, the one who had proudly declared her name to be Rin. ‘It was terrorism?’

For some reason the girl looked uncomfortable, fidgeting with her skirt, which left, Hakuno was pleased to note, little room to the imagination. ‘Um, yeah...it happened a little before my time though, s-so don’t expect me to know all the details!’

‘I know. Fifty years...’ Hakuno pressed her hands against her head with a groan. ‘I still can’t believe it.’

Her family: _gone_. Incurable disease: _cured_. Either by time or perhaps just an advance in medical knowledge. How ironic that the explosion that robbed her of the world she had once known had prolonged her existence, just enough to save her.

‘Thank you for waking me up,’ she said finally with a smile. ‘You didn’t have to; I’m a stranger and you didn’t really owe me anything. So I’m pretty grateful.’

A dark look passed over Rin’s face then and she looked away. Had they been in an old anime of some sort, Hakuno could well imagine the wind choosing to stir at that moment, to pass over her hair and force it over her expression. But as it was, the distance between them was clear and nothing barred her way to seeing the other girl’s sadness.

‘Yeah,’ Rin muttered finally. ‘You’re right.’

 

\--------------------------

 

Hakuno felt as though she was left with no option but to travel the world, just to see how it had changed. It got disturbing pretty quickly though, and every time they passed through a town or city, she was met with the same view; the buildings tall, grey, and pristine against the tiny forms of the people who passed into them, their faces usually bleak.

It was all the Harway family’s fault she learnt, thanks to the angry rants Rin put her through, usually twice a day. People were divided, allowed happiness only in the restrictions that they had no power to flee from.

‘It’s a mess,’ Rin often concluded stormily, ‘only they’ll never see it that way. So we’ve got to take action; show them the results of messing with human nature, and how much value we place on freedom.’

Rin, Hakuno decided, was the kind of person who could cause genocide with good intentions.

The next second she felt a frown twist her face; why did that thought disturb her so? Sadness welled up inside her and her fingers twitched as though they longed to reach over and stroke someone’s hand in comfort.

_‘I had no choice! They wouldn’t stop! I tried to reason with them, you know?’_

Hakuno grimaced and pressed her hand to her head.

‘Hakuno?’

Rin was touching her, sounding panicked, her hands smoothing down the arm of the sweater she’d brought her, red and riddled with fuzzy bumps.

‘I’m...okay,’ Hakuno managed. ‘I just think I need to rest for a while.’

Rin frowned and looked round. ‘Here,’ she decided, ‘they say it’s open to any member of the public after all.’

Hakuno frowned, her eyesight meshing with the paving stones as her steps trailed into the dusty edge of grey. The dizziness forced her to hobble her way across the street, the feel of Rin’s hand being her only lifeline, a chain that pressed gently but firmly across her knuckles. But still, the action felt wrong and unfamiliar, like Hakuno was a girl playing dress-up in a relationship where nothing fit. But what else could she do?

Hakuno trailed after that decisive grip, locked in a hand that felt too strong, too tight to hold any real sort of feeling in its grasp, her feet lifting up over steps that guards seemed to spring out of as soon as her feet touched concrete. She blinked and looked up, the grey clearing like fog into colour.

Rin, for her part, scowled and buried her head deeper into her polo-neck, the rim of her untrendy baseball cap swaying a little as she tugged it fiercely to the front. She waved a couple of plastic cards in front of her, things Hakuno was keen to note looked a lot like library ID cards, photos of them emblazoned within the corners. Photos Hakuno didn’t remember taking.

The guards stared, then re-adjusted  their spines into their correct ram-rod positions, marching away with a twirl so reminiscent of ballerinas, that Hakuno had to bite back the giggles. Rin tugged her forward, her glare a clear warning as Hakuno choked on the woolly sleeve of her sweater.

The museum was well-lit inside, almost like a greenhouse as it possessed glass for walls instead of the bricks and paint Hakuno could remember most museums having thirty years ago. A plague, boldly placed in the center, instructed visitors to keep to the right and travel round in an anti-clockwise direction. Oh, and also to give thanks to the Harways for their generous funding. Rin grumbled at that.

‘Ha! Look round closely – you see any information billboards next to the objects they’ve so kindly left on display? No – just plastic placards hanging up next to each glass case, saying simple things – like we were children. And those glass walls, perfect for guards to spy through, yes?’

Hakuno nodded, getting the message. They walked round carefully, arm-in-arm, Rin’s grip turning sharp as her nails dug in nervously. Hakuno fought back against the urge to wince, her eyes hungrily devouring the small little statues on display beside the jewellery cases and mirrors. They were trinkets, she realised sourly after a minute. Tiny little things with labels fastened beside them saying the era of history they were used in and the name of the archaeologist who found them. Nothing else, not even a historian’s theory of what sort of people used them, or the daily life they might have experienced. It was a far cry from the sort of thing she could remember museum notices saying.

How depressing, she thought. And then came to a stop next to a small sarcophagus, child-sized, she thought, in comparison to a bigger one she had once seen in an exhibition years ago. The top was black and jagged, unnervingly chipped so that parts of it resembled half-melted slag. But still, the shape of a jackel head arose out of the mess, ears pricked up like a rabbit’s as its muzzle sloped off into a torn-apart slide, now appearing more cat than canine.

Hakuno stared at the ears, at the sharp points they bared to her narrowed eyes and felt her headache worsen. It was almost like she was expecting them to twitch suddenly, to shuffle under her hands, the ones she now had pressed against the glass. And then Rin pulled her back, harshly leaving only the smudges from her fingertips behind and Hakuno could not help but watch them mournfully fade out, like they were mere data being erased.

‘Are you mad?’ Rin demanded. ‘Why don’t you try and look more like a thief admiring their next haul?’

Hakuno frowned. ‘I’m no thief,’ she protested half-heartedly, trying to ignore the throb of guilt inside.

‘No?’ Rin’s eyebrow twitched. ‘Then don’t get all watery eyed over some priceless artefact!’

Hakuno’s hands rose, her fingers shuddering over tear tracks as they made contact with her skin. It was true she was getting all weepy over something that had just happened to catch her eye.

Rin’s expression softened slightly. ‘Come on,’ she said gently, ‘let’s get out of here.’

And though her grip was as gentle as her voice, her fingers tracing the bone in her knuckles instead of squeezing, too fast and too tight, like a stranger might have, Hakuno could not help but feel as though she were being stolen away.

 

\--------------------------

 

Hakuno’s dreams were riddles. They were wrapped in terror, in flashes of pain and spikes of adrenaline, caught in an endless chase that had Hakuno waking, caught in a desperate desire to stay alive. But in the sleeper train she was in, the interior of the carriage hung heavy in the dark, swaying with the clunk of wheels passing over the tracks, the sound clattering out like a mottled lullaby.

Some people might have felt frightened by this. Not Hakuno. She had no home to remember, nothing to compare to the everyday strangeness of waking in a new place.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed, ignoring Rin’s snores and the sharp drone they left behind, before looking back at her and realising that even awake, she felt trapped by Rin’s noise, by all the things she said and all the ones she didn’t.

But what she could do to change anything at the moment, she had no idea.

Hakuno gave up, swung her legs back up and let her head land back on the pillow with a welcome thud.

 

\--------------------------

 

Back in her dreams, Hakuno was running, running, always running. Her voice spilled out of her in terrified gasps and she choked on the darkness that flowed out of the space surrounding her and enveloping her limbs. Her teeth chattered, even as they dissolved in her mouth.

I made my wish, she thought, though the ferociousness with which she felt this felt strange, alien. I made my wish and that should be enough.

‘Ah,’ said something else, more thought than voice, slipping through the dream, no, memory, like a hand coming in to fill the dark gaps between Hakuno’s drifting fingers. ‘There never seems to be enough time, not when death approaches. I have felt this sensation before, dear master. But unlike me, this time you will not face it alone.’

Hakuno remembered, no she dreamed, surely, that she reached out with her decaying fingers, looking beyond the revelation that she had an origin, that a human wore her appearance and had cast the beginning of her personality from within the stunted containment of a cryogenic chamber. She remembered touching something, no someone, who shouldn’t have been there.

 _Tamamo_ , she thought, _is this what eternity feels like?_

There was a pause.

‘No,’ came the reply.’ You do not feel eternity. You sink into it and if you are lucky, if you are divine, you surface and float through. But, unfortunately, as great as you are, my master, it is beyond a human’s capabilities.’

Hakuno wore the thought warmly, that she was human, human enough to die, to fail to cleave out a place for herself among the stars. She had become good at that, taking comfort in the small things since she knew that other, greater things, like breathing, were lost to her forever. In fact the possibility had never been there in the first place.

‘The best you can become,’ Tamamo continued, ‘is dust. But ah, never fear, master! For I shall become it along with you! Though...’

And here things drifted, they paused, as thoughts burned without words, flames of pain licking at the edges as they crackled and died.

‘I once ruled the sunlight,’ Tamamo said and Hakuno, in the midst of pain, had to strain to hear her. ‘And while I am less than what I once was, and a fool besides, I can perhaps do this much for you. I can ensure that you wake up within the sunlight.’

Hakuno was not sure what happened then. But she could guess with all her human limitation.  She remembered the way something seized her with a warm caress of thought, drifting over her limbs in the way she could imagine sunlight moving over her tights, and wearing down ridges of gold into the pleats of her skirt. It felt like syrup rolling through her lungs, into her chest with a stroke of heat, but oh, this heat had claws, it dug, it burnt, and what memories she had tore free, with a jagged howl of pain that left her undone. Her body, what was left of it, as it trailed diamond-shaped holes of data, fell apart like a handful of salt launched upon the waves, falling, a tiny slip of noise that came to rejoin, dissolve into the rest. But Hakuno was free, torn from what had housed her, and in claws that were not claws, in hands that were not hands, she felt Tamamo cradle her close, her heart, her invisible chest, burning like a furnace.

‘Hee hee,’ Tamamo murmured like a fool, sounding half drunk as she did so. ‘I am sorry, master. It seems my former words have been lies. I cheated, juuuust a little. The grail should have stopped me, but here, where the whole of human history is recorded, I managed to find a little of myself that I had thought lost long ago. But I have so little time now. I am no longer unseen.’

Hakuno railed her thoughts, now sharp without pain to hold them back and a failing body to tear them apart. But Tamamo ignored this. She simply... pushed. And Hakuno, much like a boat, was launched.

 

\--------------------------

 

Hakuno woke up, eyes wide in a way they had not been for what felt like months. She shivered and shook. She had always been Hakuno Kishima but now she was something more. She was not two people, not exactly, but now she felt as though she were a twin, no, as though her twin had come to root successfully in her head.

The truth was, Hakuno had always been plain, soft-spoken and long-suffering, accused by prior classmates of being too like a robot. The NPC look-a-like she had once fooled Rin into thinking she was, was actually not so far from the truth of her original personality, or at least the one she displayed to the world. In some ways, running through the Mooncell’s clutches, watching people die and living with the guilt, taking their wishes, their desperation alongside her victories, carrying memories she thought she was doomed to lose...she had been more alive there, than in all the years she had struggled on earth, bits and pieces of her falling out as the disease caught hold and made her shed years of her life. Even now, cured of what ailed her, she could remember very few things about herself. Hakuno, the Hakuno she had been as a mere fragment of data, felt more real, more human, all encompassing, like a god that had slipped beneath the folds of her skin.

She wasn’t sure who she truly was anymore. But she still wore the name proudly, Hakuno Kishinami, and at least two people, one of whom now slept beside her, thought that had been worth something.

Hakuno knelt, half-slipping, half-sliding off the bed and tearing the sheets from her ankles with a grim rip that seized the air and shook it from silence. She felt Rin stir, and cared not how she woke her.

For they had escaped. But Tamamo had not.

Hakuno bent, knocking her head against the top of her knees with a welcoming bump. The skin wore into her forehead with a red hot bolt of pain, bright as a needle that glinted in the dark. It was like a sunburn and she wanted, she felt, like she needed to cry.

But burning, with a fever that felt like remembrance, the tears would not come. They stayed, gleaming in her eyes with a watery sheen that felt bigger than the ocean. And Hakuno waited, waited for dawn to break, for the sun to creep into the carriage and brighten the room, for the colours to wash in and remind her of what Tamamo could no longer see, trapped in a death that did not suit her.

 


	2. Wandering

 

The months passed. Rin wanted to join the rebellion, some invisible, fleeting movement that gathered the souls of people through the sprawling clutch of the internet.

Which is how Hakuno found herself casting her eyes over the bright glare of the screen that held Rin’s attention most days (and nights too, if she was being honest) watching as her friend’s fingers dabbled over the keys like she was weaving a spell. Perhaps she was; Hakuno couldn’t read the computer code that streaked across the screen when Rin was in full-throttle hacker mode, but the forums Rin perused in a much more human fashion were a hub of suspicion and theories galore, all seething and bubbling away beside a bunch of seriously cute avators. It were as though everyone there was possessed.

 _‘Anyone think it’s suspicious how quiet the Harways are being?’_ One person next to a Haruhi Suzumiya avatar fretted. _‘What if they’re like doing a Victor Frankenstein and creating an army of genetically mutilated soldiers?’_

 _‘You’ve never actually read anything by Mary Shelley, have you?’_ fired back Rin and though Hakuno knew for a fact that the stranger perched behind the picture of a teenage god had no way of seeing Rin’s pucker of a frown or correctly deducing how much disdain, exactly, was dripping from her busy fingers, they still bristled.

_‘I’ve read enough to know that Victor Frankenstein created something stupidly strong and resentful enough to do something about the ugliness his creator gifted him with. And sure the Harways suck, but they’ve got more backbone than the little Victor weasel. They’d actually bother to give their monsters the sort of colourful education and brainwashing that Victor wasn’t strong enough to do himself.’_

_‘Um, okay,’_ said someone utilizing a photo of a teddy bear arranged in the pose of the Buddha. _‘Ignoring the fact that the Harways prefer subtle pushes and assassinations than falling in line with the plot of a gothic horror novel, they’ve certainly not been shy about buying up stock in the military market and there’s even rumors going round that several ships carrying bombs and what have you are being diverted from their usual routes.’_

‘I’m so glad no one here’s afraid to use technical jargon,’ Rin remarked idly to Hakuno. ‘Imagine if we were some sort of professional outfit. The Harways would shake all the way down to their very souls.’

Hakuno stared at Rin’s avator over her shoulder, a magical girl prancing around in a shower of sparkles with her blond hair held back with a ruby tiara, and had to stifle a laugh. It was the kind of thing Tamamo would have gotten a kick out of.

Still, the confidence that Rin and all these people were exhibiting, their casual tone and banter; it made Hakuno wonder just how dire the situation really was now. Rin had always talked the Harways up as the ultimate dictators, people who would ruthlessly suppress or divert an individual’s dream of freedom and think they were doing a good and just thing all the while. Certainly Leo had believed that to be so; whether the rest of the family thought the same was something Hakuno could only venture a guess at.

Still, the way Rin would brighten, her breathing relaxed but steady as her fingers leapt across the keyboard, made Hakuno think chat rooms that were not as carefully monitored as they once should have been. She was unsure if this had something to do with Leo’s death, but either way, she suspected that the Harway family felt lost without its golden heir, leaking uncertainty from the carefully planned vault they had raised him inside. But who knew for sure what they were thinking? Who they were, what they had been left with, was all concealed behind grand European-styled doors in some little Baltic country to which they had fled. But the world still turned and people either forgot or didn’t.

And Rin was not someone who could forget.

‘As long as they live,’ she said grimly, on one of her rare breaks from the computer, ‘we will never be free. Don’t get me wrong, it may take them decades to recover; something that feels the weight of its own certainty, or its own so-called righteousness, like the Harway family, is never as resilient as a properly formed individual. They’ve forgotten what it’s like to recover from a crippling blow to the ego. But they’ll re-learn. Much as it disgusts me, they _are_ still human which means they possess that capability.’

Maybe Rin was right. There was after all, no way to access the grail now, no way to sweep the word clean with merely a wish. Hakuno’s own wish had seen to that. People would now have to sort out the world themselves, once again reshaping it to their whims, one bloody war at a time.

‘I’ve done enough killing,’ Hakuno said softly in reply. ‘If I have to do it to survive, then yes, I’ll kill again. But if I have a choice...then Rin, I choose not to jump into a world where I have to take up a weapon straight-away.’

Rin shook her head. ‘Naive,’ she muttered grimly. But she didn’t argue, try to brow-beat Hakuno into accepting what she saw as inevitability. And within a few days she was gone, leaving only a debit card and the single line of an email address blotted carefully against Hakuno’s clenched fist.

Hakuno stared down at it now, running the neat biro-made marks against her memory. Once, twice, then ten times, until the email reared up into her head, kicked her brain with something like sadness, and stayed there. Then she wiped her fist clean.

‘I’ll remember you,’ she vowed, and prayed she would never stumble upon Rin’s grave.

 

\--------------------------

 

Bombs fell. Bullets rained down upon the innocent. Hakuno held no illusion that this was happening in some areas of the world. Mostly, she tried to stay away from the news. It was a stupid decision, a cowardly one, but she was just tired, tired of seeing death work its way across the globe. Bad enough that she had once had to see it tear people down into chunks of disintegrating data; now if she got too close, she would see it wipe them out into blots of blood instead, alongside gristly fragments of bone and a splash of organs to announce her new dive into reality. _This is real_ , each sharp chunk of red and white would pronounce, the few times that Hakuno was unlucky enough to let her eyes catch on a gruesome photograph. _This is what happens when you don’t live inside a computer, when there’s no handy system to clear up the remains, to re-write them out of existence. Weren’t you lucky ,Hakuno Kishinami,  the first time round?_

Hakuno shuddered each and every time the thought caught her, the memory of people losing their limbs and faces to purple and black instead of exploding into violent red producing an aching  contrast in her mind. Lucky? No. At least being cut down in the centre of a bomb explosion was probably quick. In the Mooncell, every other human apart from her and Rin had known what was happening to them, had had time to push out monologues and answer questions. There was a sly sort of torture in that.

The decision to keep away from the news cost her, of course. She would up in cities that looked incomplete from a distance, corners of buildings crumbling and walls and roofs sliding down into each other as an after-effect of human weaponry pounding against the ground. After a while Hakuno believed she knew what it meant; this place housed a rebel. Someone who wouldn’t fall into line. Or perhaps just an edgy teenager, who posted a question inside a loud forum the Harways didn’t like the look of.  How did she know? Because despite herself, she still found herself logging into the sites Rin had glanced through at internet cafes, to see more and more forums threads left incomplete, more and more accounts left neglected. And of course, there was that damning thread, left open boldly in the main moderator’s section.

 **ATTENTION!** It screamed loudly in bold red text next to a very familiar avatar. And then out in gleaming purple font ran a list of accounts, a human name tagged nest next to each one as well an IP address and the city or village it belonged to. Hakuno swallowed, matching each one up to a place she had either visited or had seen the photographic fallout from. **LEARN TO DISGUISE YOUR IP ADDRESSESS, YOU IDIOTS!!** the message concluded.

Hakuno had to turn away, to shake away the image of a seething Rin. Only she would hide her care behind an insult and be brave enough, all at the same time, to unveil something that could compromise her, that would make the eyes of the Harways glance over her account all the more keenly. That sparkling magical girl avatar didn’t seem so funny anymore.

Perhaps, Hakuno thought hollowly, swiveling round on her chair just enough to let a sinister creak spill out, now that they had lost their golden goose, Leo, the Harways didn’t care for subtly or silver-tongued persuasion anymore. Perhaps Julius had been the last person in their family truly capable of working from the shadows.

Either way, Hakuno guessed her naivety, as Rin would have labelled it, had been answered; what the Harways concealed, kept hidden from everyone else was their access to power. To death. To the whining scream they could drop from the sky without warning.

So Hakuno tried her best, sticking to smaller towns, cruising through villages, favouring walking over taxi rides. But still, once or twice, she heard the whistle of a falling bomb, hurting past the sounds of screams and the blare of a warning alarm. And each time, she had had dust rain down on her from under the eaves of the doorways she sought shelter under, rocks tumbling and sliding past the caves she tumbled inside, if she was out jogging the mountain trails.

But it happened rarely enough for her to not panic unduly. Maybe one day she would be caught. And perhaps that was the right payment for everything she had done. But until then, she would try to live, to soak up as much of the sunlight as Tamamo had once governed.

It would be a discredit, to both Tamamo and Rin, if she did not.

 

\--------------------------

 

Another Tuesday, another day of endless breathing, of merely existing. And Hakuno breathed once more, again, just to make sure. Yup, she was still alive.

Her ears still rang, the thud and shrill scream of something falling from the sky and plunging into the earth, and the small, important ‘boom’ and rattle of windows nearby were now drowned out by the sudden silence of ‘afterwards’. More importantly, the warning alarm had ceased blaring. So cautiously, she stepped out into the sunlight, the warmth infusing her limbs with what seemed to be a wobbly sort of strength.

She took two steps. Before her foot landed on the broken slab of a boulder wrong and she tripped, her ankle twisting with a horrific crack as she landed face-first against the dust.

 

\--------------------------

 

When she woke up, it was to a world of white. Blankets, thin ones, coated the surface of her skin with the scent of cheap detergent.

‘Urgh.’ She said, in a very astute statement of how she felt.

‘You were lucky,’ the nurse told her later. ‘Lucky, lucky, lucky. You could have been robbed and murdered out there. Lucky indeed, that someone brought you here. A trapper of some kind.’

Hakuno blinked and stared out at the window, sunlight trapping the area below her waist with heat. She watched the bars of lights it painted there, saw them emerge into chunky squares, almost gold against the white as the nurse spoke.

‘Grumbled a lot though. Said it was your fault he lost that fox.’

 

\--------------------------

 

Foxes are cute. Hakuno remembered Tamamo telling her that once, that she was pleased that the jackaline aspect of her godhood allowed her to fall into a more vulpine mould, all as culture shifted and twisted through the centuries. Really, it had been something like a disguise for her, something to fall back into when she had designed a corporal life for herself, even if that life had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Hakuno found herself wanting to go out, to spring free any foxes that had fallen into steel-sprung traps. It was a horrible, ungrateful thought, considering the fact that she had been saved by a hunter who made his livelihood from such things, but it made Hakuno’s teeth grit to imagine the pain those foxes experienced once the sharp jaws closed over both flesh and fur in an arc-like movement too quick for them to dodge.

There was a flash of orange at the window. Hakuno’s head turned, just fast enough to follow a tail as it disappeared around a dustbin outside.

‘Hello?’ she wanted to ask, but it was a stupid thought, an impulse that didn’t have the strength to drift through glass.

And yet, at the thought of being so weak, of being held back by something as flimsy as a window...

Hakuno’s hands clutched the sheets and her eyes sought out the silver clasp that held the glass steady within the frame. A clasp that, if she were to undo it, would help unveil her face and voice to the air.

Hakuno pushed herself up, her fingers burying beneath the duvet and helping her find the edge of the mattress. Her shoulders shifted, a groan tumbling out of her throat, as she ripped the morphine drip from her arm, a dull pain beginning to burn in her ankle as she did so. She glanced down as it poked out from beneath the covers, wincing to see the heavy coil of bandages wrapped round the jutting nub of bone that kept it attached to her foot.

...But she had felt worse pain than this.

She tumbled out the bed, half-hopping to the wall as the duvet tore, flopping away from her waist as though it were a dishevelled napkin. Her fingers spasmed, beat out small thuds of noise against grainy paint, and she half-fell against the window, her fingers lifting, up, up towards the clasp. With another groan she shoved it free and then her hands pushed. The frame let out a soft screech and it shuddered out from her flesh.

And then Hakuno swallowed. ‘Hello?’

She suddenly felt very stupid.

But as tremulous as her voice had been, it had obviously managed to find purchase in an ear. Because, not two seconds later, a fury face peered round the corrugated ripple of the dustbin.

Hakuno felt her breath catch, that same desperate pull of emotion she had felt tweak her breast at the sight of the jackal in the museum, now back at full-force. This fox didn’t have Tamamo’s expressions, couldn’t wear them nearly as well without a human face, but its golden eyes, beady and shrill without the human whites to soften them, gazed at her with a wry, analytical intelligence.

‘Tamamo?’ Hakuno asked softly, feeling her heart break slightly as the fox turned away. ‘Tamamo!’

Hakuno forced her fingers through the small gap that her feeble strength had pushed the window into forming, her breath catching as her muscles shook. ‘Tamamo, please, I miss you, I love you, please, _please_ look at me, I-’

She was babbling helplessly, like a baby and the fox had turned back to her at the word ‘love’, her ears back as though it wanted to bare its teeth and growl. But those eyes, those golden eyes, were wide, filled with hope, desperation, almost like the time Tamamo had recounted her tale of slaughter on a battlefield she had never chosen, after asking Hakuno if she believed genocide was always, no matter the circumstance, wrong.

Trembling, Hakuno reached down with a free hand, her fingers tearing, ripping along the edge of the pastel blue skirt she had brought with Rin’s money. It fell away in her hand, leaving a landslide of loose stitching behind. But her finger cured, her palm offering a flattened surface for a rag-tag ribbon to glide into. She lifted it up, pressed it through the gap.

The fox stepped forward, nose shuffling against the gift and Hakuno looped it round the bared neck loosely, clumsily arranging it into an untidy bow as she joined the two ends together.

‘You always liked pretty things,’ she murmured fondly. ‘I’m sorry if these aren’t the grand kimono silks you are used to, but it’s the best I could manage on short notice.’ She tilted her head to the side. ‘You’re right. Foxes are cute. But you know, I think I preferred it when you had hands.’

The fox stared at her.

And then the nurse crashed into the room.

The fox fled, and, after much yelling, Hakuno was pressed firmly back into the bed.

 

\--------------------------

 

Hakuno could not say why she believed, so firmly that the fox was Tamamo, somehow coming over to check on her. Her only logical basis was that Tamamo was fond of foxes, and that the last time she had shifted into a corporal form, she had been determined to do it with as many fox-like attributes as possible. She felt a kinship with them – and honestly people were less likely to freak out about a fox near human habitation than they were about a jackal.

But something about those eyes had grasped hold of her soul. And Hakuno was determined, whatever it took, not to let this new certainty go.

 


	3. Reunion

 

 

Days later, after being released from the make-shift hospital, Hakuno re-trod her steps. She passed by trees that looked only _partially_ familiar, the bark turning rusty under the dim fall of the sun, with the wax-like sheen almost glaring out at her from beneath the shelter of the finely-trimmed green needles overhead. Hakuno shivered and ended up wrapping herself under their dark shadows, straining her eyesight for paw-prints and looking for any shuffle of movement that might spell out the existence of something both smaller and daintier than her.

‘Tamamo?’ she took the time to call, every few steps. ‘Are you there?’

It was a waste of her voice, really. But her heart beat firmly beneath her chest despite it all, and honestly, Hakuno had never been any good at ignoring its persistence. She had to try.

‘Tamamo?’ she called again.

It took hours, but eventually, eventually, a nose pushed through the shrubbery. And then a snout. And finally a little furry face, the ribbon twined round its neck like a souvenir.

Hakuno’s face broke into a grin. ‘Tamamo!’

 _Well done, master_ , came a familiar voice, drifting in, over the breeze. _I expected nothing less._

A cloud drifted over the sun and the voice swayed down into a lower volume, pressing out into determined, reedy syllables.

_Step-closer-out-of-my-element-sun-too-far-from-light._

Each word was punctuated by determination and Hakuno listened, stepping out from the shadow as the cloud passed, the sun re-firing out rays of light as though undeterred.

‘How are you here?’ Hakuno couldn’t stop herself from pressing out the question, fists closed to prevent herself from reaching out to touch, to fondle their way through fur. After all this, she didn't want to scare Tamamo off.

 _I was lost,_ came that familiar, beloved voice, sounding not frightened, exactly, but wavering all the same. _Separated from what I once was. It was lonely, in the dark, with no warmth to cling to. Without you, there was nothing. I was so, so so lonely master! Ah, but it wasn’t your fault...it took an age, but eventually I drifted far enough to touch reality, the one thing the Mooncell had always wished to shape. Perhaps I had more of a talent for it. I was once a god, remember? We are born in the realm reserved for creators, could once dabble outside its influence until a certain half-mortal king governed humanity away from our spheres, helped built up their immunity to our intent through a different sort of mentality. But still, the intent of a god is a powerful thing. And I phased through the stars surrounding the Mooncell, lifted myself on their light, though they did not provide the same familiarity of the sun, all of them bubbling with a different blend of fusion in their cores...but there was enough similarity there to drive me forward. Until eventually I came to the right universe, to my domain. I glided through this galaxy, I found the **right** star and I fell through its light, into another life._

 She paused. _I have been wonderful at adapting, haven’t I, master! You should praise me! Perhaps a light tap and a squish of the cheek, saying a 'well done' and 'you tried your best! Honestly, master, you really so socially stunted! Fancy not greeting me with a heart-rendering cry and a clasp to your bosom! Ahhhh, but you staring at me so crudely with your watery eyes, is pretty delicious too!  
_

Shakily, Hakuno extended her fingers, her tongue thick in her throat. ‘Alright. Come here, Caster. I’ll give you a pat on the head.’

Mercifully, that seemed to draw Tamamo's rambling to a close, her muzzle turning out into the light as though to draw the long line of her inhuman mouth into a smile. And then, with a few jaunty steps, she pressed the ridge of her skull into the fold of Hakuno’s palm firmly as the girl knelt down on the ground, all with one regal twist of her neck.

'Why did you run from me?' Hakuno asked, the ache in her voice causing the ears below to twitch, to snap against her invading fingers. 'At the hospital, before. I called for you, I gave you that 'heart-rendering' cry you seem to want from me _now,_ and it didn't do a thing to stop you.'

Tamamo was quiet. _Master,_ her voice floated up, grave and heavy into Hakuno's head. _The only magic I carry with me is the mana I was allowed to keep from the Mooncell and the remnants of what I was once before, stuck in limbo between the realm of godhood and the mortal coil. This universe, this time, has rejected all I should be, pushed it out; it is is why mages can only use the magic they might have freely dabbled with in another life in a virtual environment. But out here, you are subject to a magic-free existence. a normal life. Something I could never have, no matter how much of my essence I try to shed. And with me here, with you, you may not even have that much._

_There is value in a choice freely given, Hakuno. I chose you, before I even knew you. We've had this discussion before, remember? No matter who my master would have been, the important thing is that I chose to devote myself to them, heart, body and soul, before we even met. And now, after being set free, from everything that wanted you dead, I wanted to see what you would choose, now that you are no longer bound to anything from the Mooncell._

Hakuno's fingers tightened through Tamamo's fur.

'You really are stupid, Tamamo. Shouldn't you be bounding up to me regardless of what I want, declaring yourself to be by one and only?' Hakuno felt no surprise at how sharp her voice was, at how fiercely it seemed to pound out of her and strike the fox below. The fur beneath quivered and Tamamo's head, so small but firm, butted up against her palm with a nervous jolt.

Hakuno did not feel sorry in the slightest.

'Confidence suits you far better, than whatever this cautious sob-story you've seemed to come up with is meant to portray. Do you think you're the heroine of some tragic romance? No, not at all! I regret to inform you that _I_ seem to have been playing that role lately. And not by **choice,** either.'

There was a pause. And then Tamamo twisted, her head whipping out from under Hakuno's skin as quickly as the breeze, all of her bounding into Hakuno's lap and throwing herself up into her face. And there, Hakuno felt the dog-like softness of her tongue whip across her cheek, once, twice, and then linger.

_Master! Master, master! You've become so clever with your words. A proper trickster! Oh, it makes my heart pound, so hot and heavy, makes me quiver like a butterfly!_

On and on it went, jubilant and familiar, and Hakuno felt nothing but happiness at the sound. And well, maybe a trace of disgust, as her fingers came away from her cheek, sticky and wet.

 

\--------------------------

 

Living with a fox was both easy and hard. For one thing, Hakuno could no longer board airplanes easily and for another, foxes were still classified as wild animals, not domestic ones...so even if Hakuno _could_ have convinced security to imprison Tamamo in the cargo hold with nothing but a mesh cage between them and her teeth, she would have been hard-pressed to explain _why_ she was transporting an animal which hadn’t been vaccinated.

‘What if you get rabies?’ Hakuno fretted. ‘How can I prevent you actually dying if I can’t legally take you to an annual check-up at a vets?’

Tamamo’s giggle drifted out into her head. It felt warm and soft, touching her mentally with a sensation that felt similar to how her skin would feel, stroked by the sunlight.

 _Master, I love you, love, love, love you! Your worry for my humble being feels me with such joy! Keeeeee! ...But you are still very foolish and naive._ And Tamamo then, with all the dignity of some pedigree poodle, puffed up her chest with pride. _For I am not like other foxes! I have magic!_

'But not enough to give you hands,’ said Hakuno wryly. She then, very slyly, reached for a nearby jar of honey, deftly untwisting the lid as she did so.

And at the stiff creak the metal let out, Tamamo’s ears perked up _. Honey! The nectar of the gods! Truly a splendid and fitting treat for my Master’s taste buds!_ She leaned forwards anxious, before giving up entirely and lunching herself up onto her hind paws. _Please master,_ she begged, front paws curling beneath the shadow of her muzzle in imitation of a cute pose she had no doubt picked up from youtube. ‘ _Oh, please, grant this humble servant a taste of tha-’_

Hakuno rolled her eyes and tilted the jar. And Tamamo leapt, her jaws rushing out to close together in a **snap** , a clash of sound so heavy and forceful that drops of honey sprayed out from between her teeth. Hakuno eyed the resulting splodge of yellow that had nestled down near the rim of her shoe with distaste.

‘I should at least find you anti-flea sachets,’ she said musingly. ‘The kind you can just rip open across the back of your neck, anyway.’

Tamamo crouched down near the floor, ears flattened against her head and whined.

 

\--------------------------

 

Fact one: while airplane staff liked to kick up a fuss over transporting a fox, trains didn’t seem to mind as much. And even if Hakuno could feel Tamamo scowling at her from behind the small criss-cross of mesh wire, despite that face being free of any human kind of muscular structure, at least a hand that **was** still decidedly human, could rest upon the plastic dog-carrier with ease and take comfort in knowing that inside she was still safe.

Fact two: Hotel staff tended to kick up more of a fuss than airplane ones did. They didn’t typically like walking in to see the spilled contents of a flea satchel wrecking the red cushioned feel of their carpet, (all thanks to an impromptu wrestling session with Tamamo) and they also happened to take offense to the vulpine quality of Tamamo's smell wafting out and lodging its way inside the bed sheets.

Because Tamamo, it seemed, shared Hakuno's desire for proximity with equal fervour, curling up under her fingers near the pillow each and every time they fell asleep. A shame then, that no one else seemed to be quite as understanding.

So, traveling was out.

Hakuno would now have to do the impossible. She would have to settle down. The money on the debit card was still good; the bank account it was connected to had a habit of re-filling itself every so often, despite how modest Hakuno tried to be with her spending habits. If anything, Hakuno felt a surge of relief every time the figures rolled up into a number higher than they should have been; it was stable proof to her that Rin was alive somewhere, putting her hacking skills to good use. Or well, illegal use.

Still, depending on money that she didn’t earn felt...well...lazy. So Hakuno tried to find some way of deserving a roof over their heads. She trawled streets looking for debris to shift, aware that sometimes small, shiny things were worth more than she might have thought. With the Harway’s influence lessening, despite the constant threat of death from the skies, people were becoming bolder, and new un-moderated art forms were exploding into style. Hakuno saw artisans burst into being from people who, only a few months back might have passed under a grey building with a bleak look on their face. They had learnt to weave vines and branches together, to make curling fences that would burn and tear more easily than the iron ones in cities, but could still put the sheep and goats they ferried down from the mountains inside. They arranged things that had once been rubbish together, bottles and abandoned wheel rims to create a tiny mountain that refracted light and eventually, thanks to a clearly placed scrap of metal, shaped like a shark’s fin, transformed into a sun-dial of sorts, carving shadows amongst the light. Hakuno even once helped make a xylophone out of an old shopping trolley.

Either way, it was enough to stop her camping out in run-down motels and camp out in large, semi-detached houses with other people, some of them chipping in through the walls, with sledge-hammers and crowbars, to help create a house that was larger on the inside than it was designed to be.

As a result, everything was communal, everyone cooked and chopped, and learnt to tell poisonous weeds from the harmless ones, salvaging books from the library and learning to piggyback off internet connections from the posher buildings overhead, coiling wires together and melting copper into their exposed insides. Every piece of knowledge was to be treasured.

But it was the faces Hakuno treasured here, the ones that broke into smiles even when the sun didn’t shine and rain poured overhead. And she appreciated the grubby hands that clutched at Tamamo’s fur, even when she whined and half-snapped at them back for dirtying her coat. Because Tamamo was no god to these people. Just another companion.

And privately Hakuno believed it was for the best. After all, all those centuries ago, hadn’t that been exactly what Tamamo or at least some small facet of Amaterasu, had always dreamed of? 

This thought was enough to distract her, one Monday morning, to make her fingers falter and cause pain bloom along the back of her palm. Tamamo’s giggle instantly burst into her mind with all the trickling thrill of a stream, the same whoosh of sound behind it. It was an echo of her teasing side, all mirth and flirtation, so reminiscent of the time Hakuno fell and banged her knees against the dark squares of the dungeons they had had to fight through, an ocean of data telling her she was on the ground and that the pain from the flat floor beneath her, free of every natural groove, was real. And that she wasn’t suspended in space, no matter what her eyes told her. Even if she _could_ still see the haloed green of the glowing jaws in a corridor that sprang off to her left metres away, enclosed in a transparent route that branched off from a corridor they had yet to re-enter. It was a sight she had grown accustomed too, no matter the instinct in her brain that had stubbornly declared it to be ‘wrong.’

There was a different kind of ‘wrong’ blaring out in her head now though, a much more superficial kind. All as Tamamo chuckled and said, _you’re kinda cute and clumsy!_ a little too gleefully, when, with a curse, Hakuno had felt the knife slip out of her grip and into her hand, all to leave a trail of beaded red behind. _But I like that! Don’t worry, master! I’ll take care of everything!_

Hakuno shot her a glare, feeling not at all dissuaded from her ire when Tamamo’s whiskers started twitching in her failed imitation of a quivering lip and her eyes turned big and wide and...trembly.

_How cruel, master! Here I am, putting my heart into giving you a confidence boost and you turn round and accuse me of trickery!_

‘I said not a single word,’ Hakuno told her dryly, before flinching and shooting a wan smile towards the old man in the corner of their shared kitchen who was peering at her curiously.

He smiled and tilted an invisible hat at her, almost dropping the spatula he was used to roll over some rather burnt fried eggs. ‘I used to do the same to my cat. It’s interesting, isn’t it? How animals can feel more judgemental than humans sometime.’

Tamamo’s chest puffed out. _Oh ho ho!_ her voice bled into Hakuno’s head, loud enough to make Hakuno wince as she wrapped a leaf from one of the plants trailing in through the cracked window, round her finger. _A mere animal am I? Well...I suppose in some aspects it is true..._

Hakuno sighed.

Tamamo eyed her finger and the dark blobs it was pressing out through the underside of the leaf, shadows that bloomed and rose up like ink blots. _There’s no need for that! My poor, poor, Master, just give me-_

‘No,’ Hakuno told her, a firm command in her tone; but it was too late, as it always was with Tamamo, for the crafty little flea-stained (okay, that was unfair and Hakuno would feel guilt for the untruthful quality of the insult later) fox had leapt up, the click of her claws loud on the grubby rim of the sink.

She slithered over rejected onion peels shoddily chopped by Hakuno’s clumsy hands and the white, almost-crescent-moon-shaped bits instantly went flying; Hakuno swore, attempting to wrestle her hand away from Tamamo’s steady gaze by pressing it against her back, losing the leaf in the process. Tamamo cast her eyes up to the ceiling in what was obviously a sarcastic roll of them, and leapt round Hakuno’s tight and tensed form, landing, with the grace of a cat, on the unintentional ledge her human partner had made out of her hidden arm. Frozen, like a bird before a hawk, Hakuno felt Tamamo's weight move across her arm, experiencing the light bounce of it as each paw pecked its way along the itchy threads of her green sweater and she swallowed as though they were carefully picking out pressure points instead of the uneven lumps of wool to land on.

The weight shifted and a rough scratch of a tongue curled over the tight pain of her finger. It was not cool and wet, but hot and glancing, like pressing a heated-pad to the wound and she could not help but hiss.

 _I was of the sun once,_ she felt Tamamo murmur inside her head. _I helped throw life out into this world. Sometimes I even drove it back into the shadows._

And indeed, Hakuno felt the pain recede, press back into normality.

 _Blood hates the intensity of a heat that no human can produce,_ Tamamo continued. _I think yours respects that enough to continue the pattern._

She leapt out, over the onions, landing inside their curled rolls and casing them to scatter towards the sink. Hakuno meanwhile, drew her hand back round and saw a braised white line where a welling of blood used to be.

_I have magic enough inside me for this._

She let her head rise, met Tamamo’s eyes. And something sharp gaze back at her, animal-cautious and old. Older than any human.

The old man meanwhile, was gaping at them.

‘Did I just see your fox’s tongue glow?’

 

\--------------------------

 

And that is how Tamamo became a...healer, of sorts. Her tongue glowed gold, raked over the injured limbs of those in the group, chasing away blood and helping to ease the recovering knots of broken bones. Some she shook her head at, one boy she crept away from, ears pressed tight and flat against her head like paper.

_No. Nothing I can do for him. It was the sun that hurt him in the first place. And the sun that will take him when it’s time._

Hakuno saw the blots of brown wrapped over his skin, the melanoma threaded over his stomach and understood. The boy was twelve, the same number of months it would eventually take for him to succumb, scared and lethargic into the ground. Hakuno was there, there to watch his sister press flowers into the grave that she asked the rest of them to help dig out with their hands and broken trowels, some mere snapped garden rakes, into the earth outside.

‘He would prefer that,’ his sister said shakily. ‘He would have hated to be burnt.’

Tamamo watched, eyes steely and forceful, tail tapping the ground like an angry’s cat and for swift stroke of a second, Hakuno hated her for being unmoved. And then felt terrible later, when Tamamo wrapped herself up against her side, that same tail no longer tapping the ground but wrapped over the line of Hakuno’s chilly neck.

 _It was sad_ , Tamamo remarked _. Sad. But I could not change a fate that was the fault of my domain._

Hakuno shuddered and gathered her close. ‘I wish,’ she whispered, and would hate herself later for being so weak and human. ‘I wish that you still had arms. And a face.’

She kissed Tamamo on the muzzle, at the flat point that soared out between her eyes. And Tamamo went deathly still.

Hakuno understood. There was no Holy Grail to wish upon, not this time.

 _Master_... she finally heard Tamamo’s voice break open inside her head.

‘Ha-ku-no,’ she enunciated carefully back. And after that, there was true silence.

 

\--------------------------

 

And in the morning, Tamamo was gone.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maybe a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to Gilgamesh with Tamamo's mention of a 'half-mortal king?'


	4. Wounded Animal

 

Hakuno set off, furious and afraid. Branches raked her face, tears stung her eyes, but still she stumbled, fury burning through her limbs and making them strong. And each branch that scored her face was hastily wretched aside by her arms which had now become swords, her fingers curling like blades to tear and sever and _pick_ twigs from the rest of the thick, knotted bodies assaulting her. Hakuno blinked, ignoring the superficial slice of red that now littered her palms, even the one that dived a bit deeper across her wrist than she would have liked. But for all her efforts, Tamamo was nowhere to be found.

No, not out at the woods where they reunited, hurt and calling in a trap (and wouldn’t that be nice, for a change, Hakuno thought somewhat savagely) and not outside the bins by a hospital window. Eventually she gave up, her surroundings now firmly morphed into buildings instead of trees, their block-like shadows cradling her as her battered boots hit the broken slabs of an untended road, the cracks evidence of a world that had no expense left over for re-paving them.

Hakuno crouched and let her fingers play with one of them, tracing out the broken blackness of it as the pale slice of her finger became purple and then grey inside of it. It felt like a metaphor for her heart, lost and blue.

She shook her head, furious with herself. This pain was nothing, compared to some of the agonies the Mooncell had forced her through. Or at least, it shouldn’t be. Earth was broken, but there was still more hope here. Especially when Tamamo was allowed to walk across it.

 _Oh no, you don’t_ , she thought. _You don’t get to leave me behind. I won the Holy Grail War. I’m not proud of it...but it gave me pride in one thing. Out of all that mess, it taught me how to love. You and Rin both. I’m not letting that go._

She thought this over and over, long after darkness had fallen and she had found the seedier internet cafes, now run by ex-library staff and without any food or drink in sight. Generators were hooked up to solar panels and old batteries had been harvested from stores, rigged up inside columns of soldered wires all woven into one tropical stream of orange copper connected to chunky, four-year old laptops.

Hakuno had never seen a more beautiful sight.

 _Rin,_ she typed, after she had sacrificed her last good coat, tucked it into the hands of someone who shivered far more strongly than she did. _I went back home. You’ve probably guessed that already. And you’ll be unsurprised at how different I’m finding it. Any family I had is gone. Only an old second cousin, who was born long after I went to sleep. But that’s not why I'm contacting you now._

_You helped me so many times in the Mooncell even when you didn’t have too, even when you lost all chance of achieving your wish because of my impulsive selfishness. Please help me again. Amazingly, I found Caster. Or she found me. She’s here. But I think I might have lost her again. I have no right to ask this of you.  But please help me._

But the email, when she sent it off, merely bounced back. Hakuno frowned and checked the untidy scrawl of an address she had faithfully copied onto the torn form of an old napkin, from that odd botched message Rin had left on her wrist months ago. It didn’t look like she’d left a typo.

What the hell, she thought. And then she went crazy, creating new accounts at all the loud forums that proclaimed the Harways as Satan incarnate. _Rin,_ each new post stated plaintively, _if you’re out there, if you’re still my friend. Please, Please, I need you._

 

\-------------------------- 

 

Hakuno, was not stupid. She did not type out an address. She uploaded rough sketches of the woods she found Tamamo at, talked about the shape of the traps you find here, all the common hunting tactics to catch foxes. And then she found a tent, leaking and with holes stabbed into its corners and set it up to wait at the clearing she had outlined with the shaky knob of a worn-down pencil and then scanned under the supervising frown of a librarian.

It took four days. And then her tent burst open, a familiar, angry face outlined by the sun and trees outside.

‘You,’ Rin declared, her scowl thick and heavy and yet making her face no less pretty, ‘are an idiot. How are you not dead, yet?’ She raged, yanking Hakuno and the tin of beans she was still holding in her hands, out into the world. ‘Do you think you’re some great spy, huh? Because you’re not! You don’t even know how to mask your IP address! Ever heard of a VPN client? No, wait, of course you haven’t,’ she sighed, eyes closed as though she was in physical pain. ‘You’re like a baby still suckling on the teat compared to me.’

‘Patronisation duly noted,’ Hakuno remarked dryly. ‘But it’s still good to see you again, Rin.’

Rin opened her eyes, propped her hand on her hip and straightened, her eyes running over Hakuno and all her dirt, her mess, with a soldier’s assessing gaze, though her mouth did tweak at the leaves scattered in her hair. ‘You, on the other hand look appalling,’ she said bluntly.

Then she took Hakuno’s hand and tugged. ‘Come on!’

Hakuno trailed after her, the furious grind of Rin’s heels against the stone-chipped path waking her up more thoroughly than any alarm ever could. Rin’s energy was vibrant, strong; it was in the way she held herself, gaze loftily sweeping over any who dared to stop and stare at the bold red of her sleek, undamaged jumper and thin cotton of her incredibly short skirt.

‘You really chose to step-down in the world,’ she muttered, though her eyes betrayed her, softening slightly at the way a child shied away from her eyes, their hands covering their face as though the colour of her face was too bright. ‘You should have stayed with me.’

You were the one who ran off, Hakuno thought irritably, wisely battling down the impulse to say it. ‘I can’t do what you do,’ she said instead. ‘It was bad enough killing as a part of a competition I never signed up for; I don’t think I can kill again. Not even for your cause.’

Rin frowned. ‘Everybody’s capable of murder,’ she muttered. ‘Besides; I’m not sure you’ll have the luxury of sitting at the sidelines forever. Not when the Harways are panicking without their golden heir in place.’

Hakuno fought down her curiosity. And her excuses.

‘Did your email break?’ she asked. ‘I couldn’t get through to you. It was the reason I ended up being so, ah, stupid.’

Rin snorted. ‘No. You’ve always been stupid, Hakuno. That was simply a little test, to check that you weren’t some kind of spy. I figured the real you would be too persistent to give up and keep re-sending the message over and over. I figured wrong. You were persistent alright. But at doing the wrong thing.’

‘Well, you’re here,’ Hakuno said quietly. ‘So some of what I did must have been partly _right_.’

Given the way Rin glanced over at her, she must not have hidden the smug under-bite of her tone well enough.

‘Six times out of ten, you get something right,’ Rin said dryly. ‘Well done; a passing score. Let’s see if we can yank it up a bit higher this time.’

 

\-------------------------- 

 

Rin had managed to book them into a hotel with actual running water. Of course she did. She was _Rin_. Hakuno had missed her. She wasn't aware of how much until Rin shook her blond hair loose, turned round and barked sharply, ‘and now you! Let me see those knots. Damn, I’ll need a high quality comb for these rose thickets.’

She scolded and tugged, and gave Hakuno her first big breakfast in weeks. And then finally, she sat and waited for Hakuno to speak.

‘Ta- _Caster_ ,’ Hakuno said, stumbled over, not sure if rolling Tamamo’s real name out into the air was an honour or disgrace to another former master. ‘I found her.’

It spilt out, the whole sorry story. Rin frowned and bit her lip as she finished.

‘She can do magic?’ she asked finally. ‘In her fox body?  I mean, I suppose it makes sense. She was a Caster. Her soul’s intact. There’s no reason why her new form shouldn’t possess magic circuits of some kind, even if they are lesser than what they once were. She’s probably not even subject to the same laws a human magus is anyway. Or at least, _would_ be. If any of us could still access magic in the physical world.’

Hakuno blinked. ‘I...guess...’she said thoughtfully. ‘I never really thought about it too much. I mean limited as she no doubt is, Tamamo’s still not going to play by human rules, is she? She’s an entirely different creature from us.’

Rin looked thoroughly exasperated. ‘That’s what I just said! Hmph! But I don’t think you get how big this is. Magic the way Tamamo does it... is unheard of. It can’t be done, not that way, not for centuries. And you’ve both been showing it off to strangers, wily-nilly! God, how are you still alive!!’

Hakuno rubbed her head. ‘She was once a goddess,’ she admitted. ‘Now she’s a fox. And I said something stupid, wished, in my head, for her to be more human. I don’t think someone stole her. I think she’s just had enough of me.’

‘Oh Hakuno...’ Rin’s eyes are soft, despite the sharp tone of her voice. She leant in, brushed Hakuno’s now sodden, shampoo-swamped hair out from her cheeks, and rinsed it back from her forehead with a single swipe, uncharacteristically soft. ‘No one could ever have enough of you. Not if they had a heart.’ She paused. ‘And now I’m going to help you find the idiot who’s got yours all worked up. What’s left of it anyway.’ She rose, swept her own wet hair back from her face, fingers already drifting to the black ribbons on the dresser. ‘And she’s a fool, by the way. Goddess or not, anyone who runs from you is a fool.’

Hakuno looked away, stared into the mirror, and pretended not to see Rin’s hands shake or the crack in her voice. Instead she looked at her own plain face and brown eyes, all of it lacking the jaw-dropping beauty of Rin and Tamamo. She looked ordinary. Average. Not someone a god would fall for, no matter what the trashy romance novels said.

Besides, here was the proof: both Rin and Tamamo had cast her aside. Which made Rin’s new words worthless. Especially if there was no ‘sorry’ attached at the end.

 

\-------------------------- 

 

The answer, Rin said, was obvious. They had to look to the past.

‘A dusty, appalling, downright boorish thing to do,’ she said, wrinkling her nose. ‘Which is, or course, _exactly_ what a god would do.’

‘What myths are associated with your stupid servant?’ She barked out this and several other questions, enough to make Hakuno’s head hurt. ‘Think, Hakuno, think! She’s an animal now. Where do animals go when they crawl off to lick their wounds? Somewhere they feel safe!’

Yes, Hakuno wanted to snap back. I know. What do you think I’ve been doing?

‘I went back to where were united,’ she said steadily. ‘Everywhere we were together; that was where she felt safe.’ She tears off her words with a sigh. ‘Or at least I once believed so...’

Rin’s mouth became a tight, taunt line. ‘You haven’t gone back far enough. She was a god once. She’s been on Earth before. Where are the places that person would feel safe, before they met you?’

Hakuno’s brain buzzed. Tamamo’s life ended in misery the one time she tried to play the game of being mortal. But before that wrenched end, there must have been places she felt safe and warm. The house she raised in for instance. Long gone by now, probably, eroded by age and re-development. Or maybe even the palace quarters she was granted, where she first knew romantic love. But. Well. Surely history has removed all resemblance to that place. All those fancy decorations and fine silks and robes, all lost, ravished by time.

Hakuno blinked back tears and saw her reflection in the mirror do the same. And that framed panel shone, the light in the room casting silver streaks over its surface to gift that mere second with an impractical illusion, dividing the room into three. It brought her back to that dusty classroom where she and Tamamo had prepared for battle, and those same silvery glints had hovered before her face, splitting the room apart into a prism. Tamamo had sometimes allowed her mirror to rise up in front of them both as though it were a camera lens wanting to capture them both within its impractically decorated frame. The silver streaks the light cast across its surface, both then and now, were the same.

And growing, in Hakuno’s mind, was the inescapable. Of course, she thought. Rin was right. She was an idiot.

‘Glad we are in agreement, then,’ Rin said smugly and Hakuno cursed herself for speaking aloud.

 

\-------------------------- 

 

Reusing the credit cards Rin had bestowed upon her was a novel experience after months of commune living. Actually riding on a train was another. But eventually they reach it, the place Hakuno had dug out from her untrustworthy memory. Amanoiwato Shrine.

And there, lapped at by the river biting at it’s heels, the legendary cave, Ama-no-Iwato. The tumble of rocks and slathered-on mud rose up as though to form a path, caped by the white torii that hovered, small and determined, in front of the overwhelming darkness. It looked almost pitiful.

But Hakuno did not hesitate. She had been in much worse places and stared into a darkness worse than simple mortal death. She felt Rin freeze behind her and without a second’s thought, snagged her by the wrist and dove in.

This time, she would take the lead.

 


	5. Excavation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve never seen the Ama-no-Iwato, which will be pitifully obvious for those of you who have been there and are now reading this. Since it’s an undeniably sacred place, no photography is allowed inside the actual cave itself; therefore I’m using a great deal of imagination here as well as a few photos of the outside area of the cave to write this part. All inaccurate details should be chalked up to this, as well as the fact that Fate/Extra happens in a parallel timeline where things may not always match up to our physical reality, blah, blah, blah. Don’t you just love cop-outs like that?

 

Tamamo. Caster. Amaterasu **.** Whatever fragment of her remained, was here. Hakuno saw it in the small, puppy-like shadow that wavered in her vision, golden light spilt from the snuffling form and imposing itself in the background like a Budda; and it was arranged in the calm kneeling image of the petite fox-eared girl she had befriended in the Mooncell.

 ** _‘Oh.’_** The voice that echoed round them, that seemed to seemed to seep out of the crannies in the cave wall, was not however, the woman’s she loved. Iit was feminine, yes, but deeper, more resonant. Like a voice actress projecting her voice a few tones lower, making it gruffer, transforming it into the shape of a teenage boy’s. And the effect was multiplied, a whole chorus joining in with her words. ‘ ** _You brought another member of your harem, little one? Was a god not enough to satisfy you?’_**

The tones were mocking, hinting cruelty in their laughter.

But Hakuno simply stepped forward and dragged Rin with her, refusing to let her fall behind.

‘That’s not true. Only _you_ would have the imagination to conjure up an imaginary harem for me! I simply came to bring you home, Tamamo. And Rin was helping me do it.’

 ** _‘Oh, she wants to do more than help you,_** ’ the voices hissed. And within her fingers, Hakuno felt Rin’s wrist tremble. **_‘She wants you to cry to her, to love her, to see her and make her better.’_**

‘Sounds like you’re projecting,’ Hakuno replied, her voice steady. Her fingers tightened over Rin’s sleeve protectively, enough to feel the bone beneath, and in her imagination, Rin’s frightened flickering pulse. ‘Isn’t that what you always wanted from me?’ And then she swallowed. ‘And what...,’ she admitted, a quaver to her voice, ‘what I might have wanted from you?’

**_‘Yes. Want. Desire. Humans always want more. So did I. A mark of how far I’ve fallen, how close my wish has come to being realised. Selfishness is such a benediction, isn’t it?’_ **

‘That’s not all it is.’ Rin’s voice was thick and determined, though it still shook with unease. ‘I don’t like gods. I always thought them selfish, doing nothing but take, demanding worship from those they deem lower. I like the way things are now, humans being selfish, knowing there’s no one we should bow down too, being able to actually see the sky, knowing there’s no one we should raise above it. No one should be a _god_ now.’

She spat out her last sentence and Hakuno for a moment felt as though she was substituting the word ‘god’ for Harway.

‘Don’t you dare look down on human selfishness! Don’t pity us for something we’ve had to earn, that we’re still struggling to earn now, today!’

The yellow of Tamamo’s shadow form rose and spread like a fan, eight tails playing like licks of flame against the walls. They formed a tapestry of gold and it hurt to look at, so much that Hakuno felt Rin gasp and flinch. She, herself, had to lower her eyes a little.

‘You came here, to the cave you once hid in from your brother. Why?’ she asked.

**_‘I once saturated this place with my power, all those days I hid the light of the sun from the world. Some part of me still hides cloistered in these walls. And I wished to make a decision. I could use this part to etch out new magic circuits in my soul, draw them down over my form like a veil. I could craft myself a new shape in this way-’_ **

‘Creating new magic circuits? Are you crazy?!’ Rin raged, cowering from the light, still shaking but sounding furious, a storm boiling in her voice. If she could set the world on fire, scorch it with lightening, she’d do it. ‘The pain that would cause, that would be like sticking an iron-hot rod up your spine! The mages of old, I’ve read their accounts, their practises! Enough to know that what you’re doing is suicidal!’

‘ ** _Compassion,_** ’ the voice chuckled, lifting out into gleeful mirth. **_‘Yes. Something I never understood, not until I could suffer. And even then, very few ever gave it to me.’_**

The tails on the wall straightened, the ears cocked like a dog, expectant and waiting. And Hakuno had the impression that she was being stared at, directly.

**_‘You gave it. I was lucky. And I want you to be lucky too. That’s why I came here. To do this for you.’_ **

Sizzling red, a vein, a forked tree branch, something of that nature, painted itself out against the wall, streaming up through the gold shadow and then there was a whirl of sound, a thousand screams of agony rending the air. The puppy-like form buckled and writhed, flickered up into a small fairy-like waif.

Hakuno dropped Rin’s hand and darted forward as more screams came, rising into the air like a cacophony of angry spirits.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she gasped, whispered, maybe shouted, though even that was drowned out by the screams. She rushed forward under the golden tails, now shrinking and twisting as more veins, or impressions of circuits dappled the wall and Hakuno stumbled, dropping down to touch the dark centre, now distinctly girl-shaped. ‘You left me, I thought you’d run away, that you were tired of me and my...everything.’ She cradled Tamamo, still dark, but now with mortal colours seeping through, the familiar pink and purple giving way to gold-stained sleeves, which rose to reveal hands. Hands which now framed Hakuno’s face, trailed her cheeks, wiped away the salt of tears that fell, heedless of everything else.

‘Fight Caster!’ Hakuno whispered fiercely. ‘Do your best! Banzai!’

And below her, a patchwork of shadows instead of gold, godly light falling over her form, Tamamo laughed. And Hakuno grinned, remembering a story, of a cluster of foxes gathering round Tamamo after she was spurned by the emperor, her first human love, and letting sympathy spill from their lips instead of encouragement. She hoped she had fared a little better than them this time round, centuries later.

‘I did this for me too, Hakuno,’ Tamamo murmured. ‘I wanted to be human. I wanted to be selfish, though I didn’t realise how badly until it was too late to change my fate. I did this for me, as well as you. You think I’m into the taboo of bestiality? Pah! Some things, even I do not break.’

Hakuno laughed. And concentrated, felt her own barely functioning circuits beneath her skin, breaking into her bones. This was her imagery, her trigger, when she tried to cast a spell in the Mooncell, imagining a disease burying beneath her, eating her alive, the way something had tried to destroy her brain long ago. But it was useless, of course; moments later she felt nothing but short stabs of pain littering her spine and muscles, despite the overwhelming feel of magic all around her. But then what had she expected? No would-be mage could make a spell come into fruition, not since the nineteen-fifties when magic had leaked out from the world.

‘Always sex with you,’ she whispered to Tamamo, and hated herself for not being able to help, to push out even a little magic. It was all gone, everything human spellcraft could design had fled, mana bleeding out into a separate universe years and years ago. Tamamo was simply cheating, being impossible, and relying on a godhood that transcended human rules.

And yet, was it her imagination, or did Tamamo breathe just a little easier as her fingers ran over her hair?

Tamamo turned, wrestling her way into Hakuno’s lap and as her eyes, pain-stricken and still yellow in a shade no human gene could produce, found the dark, ordinary brown ones above, Hakuno felt her breath catch.

‘This is a magic you have, Ha-ku-no,’ she Tamamo enunciated. ‘You alone.’

Her fingers found her former master’s. Weaved into their gaps, held them close, and nestled them in a surrounding palm that felt as if it had been doused daily in hand lotions and cocoa butter.

‘A magic that isn’t magic. You humans are so stupid. Even striped of mana, you can do so much with only a touch.’

 

\--------------------------

 

Tamamo ate and ate on the train. Tofu and pale pink sushi disappeared down her throat and it was weird to see her head move, her mouth gulp, without the constant twitch of her ears to accompany them. Or the familiar wave of her tail behind, the tip of it bright and ready to remind them all of what she was. No, now she looked ordinary, mortal....Mostly.

‘I finally got rid of them!’ she explained gleefully. ‘Cut out those ugly jackal things completely! I’m so removed from being Amaterasu that it was easy to make me fully mortal.’

‘Bully for you,’ Rin said waspishly as crumbs fell and sprayed the side of the table.

Tamamo covered her mouth and giggled. ‘Ooopsie! It’s been so long since I’ve been able to eat like a person that I’ve forgotten all my dainty, lady-like manners!’

She promptly stabbed a chopstick into a steamed chicken gyoza and pushed it into her mouth whole. The effect was not unlike seeing a hamster stuff its cheeks.

‘Sure,’ Rin muttered, watching Tamamo’s cheeks swell like a hamster’s. ‘I believe you.’

Hakuno shook her head. She couldn’t help but smile, letting it stretch and distort her mouth into something that wasn’t too cartoonish. Alas; Rin handed her a pill for stomach ingestion not a second later.

‘I still have magic though,’ Tamamo admitted, scraping the side of her hands with her tongue to pick up stray specks of rice. ‘More than any human alive today.’ She fluttered her eyelids at Rin and grinned sweetly as Rin grit her teeth in return.

‘I think you’ll find thing have moved on from your time, miss former-goddess,’ Rin retorted. ‘Computer hacking is a much more worthwhile skill. How many codes have you cracked recently?’

Life, Hakuno decided as Tamamo puffed out her cheeks in a pout she’d missed more than she’d like to admit, was about to get much noisier. Still. It was better than what she’d had months before.

 

\--------------------------

 

Tamamo, naturally, loved showers. And soap. And shampoo.

‘Hakunoooo,’ she purred, lavishly draping her towel over her bare shoulders. ‘Come with me. And kindly allow this humble woman to scrub your back?’

Then the seductive look quickly dropping as Hakuno simply stared back at her, Tamamo dropped the towel entirely (Rin watching the way it flapped through the air with a drawn-out air of resignation) and launched herself at her unmoved partner.

‘Pllllleeeeeeease!’

Hakuno sighed, her lap now filled with a squirming naked woman. Stonily, ignoring the way Rin’s eyes were tracing out every bare curve with heated delight, she ran her hands into the pink mop of Tamamo’s hair. And then tugged once, firmly.

The effect was instantaneous.

‘Ow!’ Tamamo jerked upright, ugly crocodile tears springing up into the corners of her eyes. ‘Mast-Hakuno! How could you be so cruel! Ah, I always knew you were a sadist!’

‘Me?’ Hakuno rose up, a hand gracefully tipped against her chest as though she were mortally offended. ‘Cruel? I don’t know where you got that idea. It’s not like you look cute, all flustered and teary eyed like that...’

But still, she felt a smile tweak her mouth at the end, ruining what she felt to be a pretty decent acting job.

She felt the smile stretch, transforming into a full-blown grin as she caught the rise of Rin’s eyebrows and the sharp look the other girl threw her, all as Tamamo threw herself against the bed, ruffs of her hair pressing against Hakuno’s knee. Hakuno’s hand reached out, to rub and play, diving deep until her hand reached the skin; she would miss the fox ears, she reflected. Those had always been fun to play with, the tickle of white inside the orange velvet helping to make Tamamo melt into an overgrown cat. As she was now, she was simply squealing like a fifteen-year old girl.

Well, thought Hakuno. Perhaps she still was one, at heart.

She turned to Rin. ‘Enjoying the show?’ she asked levelly.

Rin shrugged and Tamamo instantly whipped her head round at the sound of the shifting pillow, her look turning sly and slanted and almost coy, as Rin’s pose, leaning back against the pillows, screamed of relaxation. All she would need, Hakuno thought wryly, was a cigar hanging from her lips or lax fingers, and she would look like a pimp. Or perhaps just a haughty empress.

‘Oh myyy,’ purred Tamamo, ‘fancy a repeat performance? That is’- she added hurriedly – ‘if it’s all right with _you.’_ Her eyes flicked back to Hakuno worriedly.

Hakuno flinched. Ah yes. Rin and Tamamo had shared quite an intimate afternoon together once, when Tamamo had been in desperate need of replenishing her mana. She didn’t begrudge them the memory. Hakuno, after all, pathetic mage that she was, had been in no real state to fix the issue.

‘I’m surprised you aren’t suggesting a threesome,’ she said as airily as she could. And wasn’t entirely surprised when she saw Rin visibly ponder over the words.

Tamamo however, rolled her arms over her chest and pouted. ‘If you allowed me to call you master, I might have allowed the idea of sharing you,’ she said stoutly. ‘But, eeeeh, if you even think of cheating on me, or allowing another to lay hands on your form, then would you kindly fall over and die?’

That last word was said so perkily and with such good cheer that Hakuno felt a shudder run down over her spine. It didn’t help that Tamamo was beaming right up into her face, the full force of the sun present in the wide curve of her smile.

The smile widened as Hakuno felt heat rise to her cheeks. ‘Y-you were the one who brought it up!! You practically offered yourself up to Rin on a platter!’

Tamamo’s smile thinned and her eyes became narrow slits as she tapped a finger idly on Hakuno’s thigh. A finger, Hakuno noted idly, containing a very sharp nail. It was by no means a claw. But the brief press of it on her skin, and the shallow dip it craved out there, held a swift strength, a brief bead of pressure that threatened to cut through to the muscle below.

‘I have a blind spot for you, my _former_ master,’ she said, enunciated focus on the word ‘former’ – and Hakuno had to smile at that and the brief flash of frustration that twisted Tamamo’s expression at the sight - because it meant Tammao _was_ listening and could _learn_ , that she was adapting to the changed hierarchy between them now that they were no longer subject to the Mooncell and it’s rules. And more importantly, that she was respecting Hakuno’s comfort zone.

‘I find myself overwhelmed with rage at the thought of you ever daring to share your body with another. So much so, that all logic, all fairness is thrown aide, buried by the avalanche of feelings that cloud my head and breathe life into my rage! I’m afraid there is no reasoning with me on this subject.’

‘Oh no,’ Rin broke in dryly. ‘How on earth will I survive without sex from either of you?’

Tamamo aimed a benevolent smile in her direction. ‘I am sure even the most diseased prostitute would have you, Rin- _san_.’

The mockery was cold, it curled the honorific, made Rin’s fist clench. But more importantly, it made the shout spring out of Hakuno’s lips. ‘Tamamo!’

Tamamo opened her mouth. Shut it again. If her ears had been present, Hakuno was sure they would have been flattened against her skull. ‘This is what I meant, Hakuno. The rage, my jealousy...I become as cruel and merciless as a force of nature.’

‘You flatter yourself,’ Rin muttered. But her fist was still clenched, her eyes fixed on the wallpaper beyond Hakuno’s shoulder, as though the rosebud unfurling there above Tamamo’s head was the most interesting sight in the universe. ‘Humans are far crueler than any gale or storm could be. Welcome to being mortal. Now you truly are as petty as the rest of us.’

There’s a strange look on Tamamo’s face. As though she’d heard the winning lottery numbers, but realised there was a catch.

Still, the moments afterwards, before they settled down and went to sleep, were troubled, full of silent thoughts they couldn’t give voice to. Hakuno knew, for she stayed there, awake, between the long hours drawn out between night and morning, eyes held open by the sight of the ceiling, decorated by not so much as one artistically bent petal, but simply the blare of boring white. And she failed to hear the sound of a single snore beside her.

But still something in her brain gave way, made hours flash and disappear between one blink of the eyelid and the next. For when morning touched her, the light from the sun spilling out over the sheets, Rin was nowhere to be seen. Just a rumpled crease in the bedsheets remained and a lingering sense of wrongness.

Hakuno leaned out, touched the place where Rin should have been. And felt coolness below her fingertips.

Rin had left early. And without saying goodbye.

 


	6. Restoration

 

This is all your fault, she wanted to rage and snarl at Tamamo. All of it. I had just gotten you both back, and then you made her leave!

She said none of this, simply striding round the room and shoving arms through sleeves that her fingers fumbled through instead of smoothly sliding inside, made clumsy by being awake for only minutes instead of hours, the blood thrumming sluggishly inside. Tamamo watched her, her gaze pensive. But she did not look small or cowed, kneeling on the edge of their bed.

‘Hakuno,’ she said, her voice firm and gentle. ‘Maybe you should let her go. And not try to follow.’

Hakuno whirls, her body only half encased inside a shirt that Rin’s money had brought for her long ago. ‘What! How can you say that! Is this more of your stupid jealously speaking? Rin has never done anything to you! We owe her everything! The world and more besides!’

‘I know,’ Tamamo said smoothly, her eyes never darting away from Hakuno’s rage-filled ones. ‘And she feels a similar sentiment towards you.’

Hakuno scoffed. ‘Oh, so now you’re comfortable taking yourself out of the equation!’

Tamamo shook her head, now smiling softly, like she was amused by a small child stomping their foot at her. ‘It’s different. Rin does not hate me. But she does not like me all that much either. I have always been...a servant to her.  A manifestation of a person long dead, who by all rights has no place in this world as it is today.’

Hakuno opened her mouth to protest but Tamamo’s palm rose, a lowly flag of surrender that held firm against Hakuno’s gaze, slicing the room in two. ‘I know, I know, she came with you to help you find me. She may not like me, but she is no more a willing murderer than you are Hakuno. It takes more than simple dislike to walk away from someone and leave them to their fate. And Rin’s hate is reserved for a much bigger target.’ She paused. ‘A target she has probably gone back to pursuing even as we speak.’

Fear clogged Hakuno’s throat at that, and in a blind panic, she snatched up their room keys.

‘We’ve leaving! Today, right now! And you are going to help me find her Tamamo.’

Tamamo smiled, no trace of warmth in the slant of her lips.

‘Oh? Is that your command, master?’

Hakuno froze. And Tamamo tilted her head to the side, smile still in place.

‘You have no seal to bind me to your words. No magic to help you in your search. And none of Rin’s skill with her computers.’

‘I’ll still find her. With or without your help,’ the answer is instantaneous, barely thought through and it still came spilling out of Hakuno’s mouth anyway, a wild, angry thing. ‘I’m sorry you heard what I said like a command. You’re right, I don’t own you anymore; I’m not sure if I ever really did, despite the system the Mooncell put in place. You’re not my servant and I’m not your master.’

Hakuno raises her gaze from the carpet where it had fallen as she had thought and now she looked at Tamamo properly, saw her hair fall over the bend of her human ears and the flash of her teeth arranged in the square, knob-like cut of truly human ones, not a canine in place. Or at least, not ones that gleamed more sharply than the ones Hakuno held in her own jaw.

‘You’re my girlfriend-,’

‘-wife,’ Tamamo corrected sharply.

‘Eventually,’ Hakuno promised, a headache forming at the thought of all the legal hoops she’d have to clamber through and the paperwork that would have to be drawn up for Tamamo, which Rin _would_ help her with, once they found that headstrong idiot. But it was worth the pain, just to see Tamamo's smile flare up and crackle outwards into a disbelieving chortle.

‘Oh-ho! Is that a proposal I hear?’

‘It’s whatever you want it to be, Tamamo,’ Hakuno answered bluntly. ‘I can redo it, make it as romantic as you wish later on; but I warn you, you won’t be marrying a nice person. I’m not your master and I can’t command you. But I can ask and bribe. And I’ll give you the most outrageous, cringe-inducing wedding you’ve ever stumbled into if you’ll help me!’

Tamamo’s smile softened. ‘Oh Hakuno. You foolish thing. Though don’t get me wrong, that only adds to your charm!’ She laughed, the silly giggle wringing itself out tightly across the space between them. Before it abruptly stopped. ‘Rin’s...a little in love with you,’ she said finally, a quaint softness to her tone. ‘Perhaps you may not have noticed it, my dense Hakuno. But I, a woman finely attuned to the emotions of others-’

‘Oh, really?’ Hakuno muttered.

Tamamo looked down her nose at her. ‘Kyah! Your cruel words are like razor sharp stabs against my heart! You would never understand, never, never, just how cruel you are to a creature of such delicacy as myself, one who sensitivity can pick up on the tightly held emotions of another woman! Especially one in the throngs of love.’

You just said she was a _little_ in love with me, Hakuno wanted to protest. But she was already thinking about the possibility, trying to match it up to those small instances of sadness she had sometimes seen caught in Rin’s eyes.

‘You think she’ll simply smile nicely while you give her an invitation that will bind you to another woman for eternity?’ Tamamo chattered on, her tone taking on a brisk, business-like rush. ‘She needs to be alone right now, not the new subject of a rescue party, or your new project. Your heart bleeds a little too easily, my love, but this time, you must think of how to stop jamming a stake through Rin’s! We aren’t writing a shoujo manga here.’

Hakuno digested this information, pondered over it briefly. Then buried it down deep. ‘That doesn’t matter now. You said so yourself. Rin’s gonna go rushing in to fight the one thing she wants to crush down more than any other.’ Hakuno took a breath. ‘And you’re the only person on the planet with the magic to help her succeed.’

 

 --------------------------

 

Tamamo had no ears to twitch, no scent to follow. But her eyes were sharp and they landed on things, tiny shifts and cracks in reality that Hakuno couldn’t see. Or at least she assumed that to be so.

‘There is no mana here, not in this lost, lonely universe,’ Tamamo muttered, her hand locked over Hakuno’s own. The hotel bathroom’s mirror was on the bed before them, tiny screws scattered over the floor; Tamamo had none of that superhuman strength and speed that she once possessed, and so it had been down to Hakuno’s heaves and grunts, her arm responsible for most of the heavy lifting.

Tamamo drew a fingertip against the icy surface and Hakuno watched, enchanted, as a ripple followed it.

'But mirrors are doorways to many things, many worlds. And there is life in this world, despite the lack of mana, still aura and spiritual energy, souls that keep on recycling, even if they fail to connect with the dormancy of the circuits infusing the bodies they’re born into. I can connect through the things that are still here, continuing, despite the loss of magic.’

A red dot appeared in the mirror, a wave of gold unfurling over thin shoulders. Hair, and it was Rin’s and then some of it fell, silver flashed as a knife sheered through. And then Rin’s features stared out, determined and now remarkably boyish, practically elven without her long hair to dapple her ears. The red sweater wrinkled away from her skin and her figure stepped out into the centre of the mirror, fully formed and pressed into a man’s suit of deep burgundy. Hakuno even noticed that she had pressed something down into the centre of her trousers, forming a small deceptive bulge where there should be nothing pressing forwards at all.

Tamamo’s lips twisted into a pleased smile. ‘Well done, Rin. It seems you have more than enough spirit to carry you forwards.’

 She stood up, Rin losing form and vanishing into the mirror. Gold erupted, divided and crossed into the shape of a crown. Fields passed, green flashes that crossed under the mirror’s frame like the high-speed view from a train window. And something, a building, of a church maybe? That hovered into view and stayed.

Tamamo observed it, lips thin.

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘And now I am grateful that I paid attention to my time as a Servant. We’re going to pay our respects to an old king, it seems. One who had far more spunk than Leo.’

 

\--------------------------

 

Glastonbury Abbey was quiet when they arrived, the grave of King Arthur even more so.

Hakuno stared down at it, and tried to imagine the legendary person who had breathed their last before being lain in such a tiny, nondescript rectangle.

‘Are you sure they’ll come?’ she asked hating how plaintive her voice sounded.

Tamamo stepped closer, her arms hugging round Hakuno’s middle tightly. Despite her mortal warmth and her lesser strength, they felt like a vice, a vice strong enough to support Hakuno’s suddenly shaky legs.

‘If you want her back, my lovely idiot, then that is what you shall have.’

Her breath was fierce on the side of Hakuno’s face, the glint of gold in her eyes even more so. Mortal she might be now, but a shard of the god and all her more animalistic savagery remained.

‘I shall seize her by the hair and tug her back if I have to!’

Hakuno blinked and leant back slightly, her weight shifting against the thin arms that held her.

‘With these Amazonian arms of yours? No way.’

‘Hush,’ said Tamamo crossly. ‘I have other means at my disposal. Never underestimate a woman and her hidden arsenal!’

‘...I’m a woman too, Tamamo...’

Tamamo sighed happily, and Hakuno felt her hair crinkle and stir, spayed out by the sliding press of a cheek. ‘Yeeeeessss. The most wonderful one in the world! But your arsenal is blunt and dull in comparison. Oh, but that’s what I like about you!’ she said hurriedly at Hakuno’s glare. ‘You’re too honest to run someone through without telling them why, first!’

Twilight touched the ground, dark stirring the space between it and the sky, causing navy to dapple the grass. And it made Hakuno feel sad at the way the dark patch of earth before her didn’t match up to its google image search, how there was no marker, no placard to announce the last resting place of someone, who for all intents and purpose, could have ended up in the tournament she had fought through.

‘I wonder what Gawain would think,’ she murmured.

‘Better he never knew,’ Tamamo stated decisively. ‘And even if he did, it might not have made any difference. He swore his absolute loyalty to his new king, the one still living, even if he knew him to be an inferior in every way possible. Rigid people like Gawain don’t go back on their word; more fool them.’

And then Tamamo suddenly twitched, eyes turning sharp as footfalls, pressing down unevenly, traveled towards them, out of the night. Accompanied only by the quick raps of a stick hitting dust.

Tamamo growled and unpeeled herself from Hakuno, her hand refusing to fall away from her side entirely, as a woman lumbered towards them, followed by stately, boyish Rin. Whose dark hair fell forward, sloped down over her head instead of falling back, pinned into a braid or plaited coils, the way Hakuno had always imagined one of the female Harway’s family members to wear their hair. It looked, under the darkening light, almost greasy. The wind caught at it, pulled it free of her velvet coat entirely. And Hakuno stepped back, face paling as she met a ghost.

‘You’re-‘

‘Spot the family resemblance do you?’ the woman asked roughly. There was a slight drawl to her vowels, forming an accent Hakuno couldn’t recognise. ‘How irritating. To be compared to a failure.’

Hakuno’s mouth snapped shut. Julius had been a lot of things. Assassin, lonely, full of hate. But also strong enough to briefly conquer death itself. In some ways, he had been stronger than Leo. But, the real failure was the way the Harways had failed them both; they had had the potential to be so much more. And the Harway family had never even bothered to look or nurture; they had simply thrown it away. Or in Leo’s case had taught him to throw the wrong kind of things away.

The woman sighed and leant forward a little more on her stick.

‘King Arthur; one of the golden giants of history. Leo should have surpassed him in every way. Still: he’s gone.’ Her eyes lingered on Hakuno. ‘Felled by a peasant. At least Arthur was run through by his own son, bastard though he was.’ She turned to Rin. ‘You promised.’

‘I did,’ Rin said, her voice falling to a lower timbre. Gravely, as though she were trying to disguise the feminine lilt – pretty successfully too.

Hakuno frowned. ‘Promised what?’

But Rin wouldn’t meet her eyes.

‘He promised to give me all the data on all those who would speak out against me; I wasn’t sure what to believe at first. A quick PM on the darknet, an advert slipped on the inside of a cafe one of the cook’s wife frequents; but he came alone, unarmed. And offered up all the passwords and internet history of one such pest, Rin Tohsaka.’

Hakuno tried not to stare. Rin hadn’t dyed her hair, couldn’t change her height. But she was moving stiffly, speaking differently, and had lost most of that confident swagger. Even the way her eyes dipped to the ground and wandered round, away from Hakuno’s own, did its part to disguise her as a different person. That, or Julius’ mother, or aunt, or whoever, was too jubilant, too sure of herself to look too closely. But then again, didn’t Hakuno learn, just by seeing how people could change when confronted with their own mortality, how effective a disguise a change in body posture could be?

‘She said you would turn up here.’ The women grinned, something snakelike in her smile. But strangely, nothing in the line of her mouth reminded Hakuno of either Julius or Leo. ‘I’m simply charmed  to make your acquaintance, Rin Tohsaka.’

Hakuno’s mouth dropped open.

‘You’ve dyed your hair,’ the woman continued, starting to stomp a circle round her. ‘I can see why; blond is such a tacky colour. A dull, drab, mouse-like hue definitely suits you better.’

Tamamo leant back, hand sliding down over her hip. ‘Oh-ho, someone’s bold.’

And Rin’s head twisted, her eyes and mouth suddenly sharp in a way they weren’t before.

‘Zero,’ she muttered, as a small flame blossomed out of tree nearby. In the gathering dark, the light seemed to boom out from behind the ruined stone walls like a bomb and the effect was dizzying; the pop of orange and heat turned into a small ball that took hold of the eyes, warping the dark space of the bark into something bright and deadly. But it was the resulting whistle of an explosion that threw everything into perspective, that and the hunk of meat that dropped down nearby. And though there was no sun, Hakuno could still make out the slight gleam of leather wrapped round a trailing ankle and the end of a shoe.

Another small boom then, accompanied by a push of light, and someone else exploded into orange. And then fear fell through the air, entering the atmosphere as bullets peppered the earth, all carefully dodging round the hunched-over imprint of the Harway woman, to try and tackle their bodies.

‘There are six more!’ Rin yelled, masculine tone dropped from her voice completely. ‘Gah!’ And then she fell to her knees and ate dirt, spitting a small stone out of her mouth. ‘Why did you guys even come?!?’

Hakuno was on the ground too, heart in her mouth and terror tightening her limbs, too much for her to even want to start to answer. They were exposed, they were _dead_ , and Tamamo’s arm, the one that had been pressing her down with a fury that almost surprised her, had now left her back. Hakuno shoved down the cry that erupted from her throat as Tamamo stood, the whiz of bullets creating a background of deadly rain, a rain that failed to touch her. Instead that grey halo of lead wavered in the air, faint groans leaking through the atmosphere itself as something rebelled against physics; long enough for a familiar looking mirror to slide out into that hailstorm and spin like a disc. Tamamo raised her arms and the mirror started orbiting them at a deadly speed, so fast that streaks of silver passed before them, pasting the space around them with strobe lighting effects. Hakuno heard noises, like the spitting of rain against a tin roof, before, in the dark, she saw small bits of gravel drop down. She blinked and realised they were the crumbling relics of bullets; the mirror had met each and every one of them, spitting them back out with its harsh, impossible surface.

There was a larger thud then. For the Harway woman had taken a single breath. And then fallen to her knees. She looked at Tamamo as though she were a goddess, stray streaks of tears flecking her cheeks.

‘Magic...real live magic...’ she whispered. ‘How?’

Tamamo grit her teeth. ‘You should not covet this,’ she hissed. ‘This power is for the defence of the one person who matters the most in this world and nothing more!’

The woman let out a howl at that. ‘For a rebel? A single stupid rebel-’

She cut off, choking, blood blossoming on her tongue and Hakuno gasped as she saw the woman’s stick raised and pointed at her in her trembling hand, the end uncorked like a bottle to revel a shinning nozzle inside. It wavered for a moment, then fell, the bullets inside never to be used.

‘Yes,’ Tamamo said icily, uncrossing her arms from the almost poetic glide they had sailed into, and the woman choked again, purple flames billowing from up out of her throat to unfurl like smoky petals. Hakuno shivered, recognising the smog-like effect, some spell that looked a lot like Tamamo’s Land of Eternal Bane, but on a much smaller scale.

‘For Hakuno, yes. The rest of the world is no contest. Your ideals even less so.’

 

\--------------------------

 

‘I didn’t think you would come,’ Rin repeated lowly. There are dark shapes pressed into the ground around them, little snippets of clothing around their shredded forms. And not all from Rin’s sleight of hand.  ‘I placed small little bombs into the pockets of every sniper I made contact with. The plan was to get her there, reveal who I was and then hold her hostage. I thought maybe...I could make a difference.’

Hakuno stared at her. ‘Rin,’ she said calmly. ‘You’re a real idiot.’ And then she slapped her across the face. Hard.

Rin thudded into the dirt, small and pitiful. She choked out something that sounded suspiciously like a sob. Maybe even a muffled ‘idiot’ to accompany it.

That would be just like Rin, wouldn't it, Hakuno thought with a tired sign. She was interrupted by a groan nearby, coming from another body that was slumped on the ground, longer and more muscular than all three of theirs, and Tamamo’s face hardened in response. Her hand rose and cleaved through the air as though she were a referee, her mirror imitating the motion and slicing downwards as sharp as a knife. The groan cut off rapidly, distorting into a quick, bloody ‘urk.’

Hakuno hissed out a breath from between her teeth. ‘Stop it,’ she said testily.

Tamamo winced, but the hardness didn’t leave her eyes. ‘I knew people like this,’ she said steadily. ‘I once slaughtered a whole battlefield full of them. And I’ll never forget the look in their eyes...these people think the same. The weight of their devotion to their cause shapes them.’

Rin gave a hollow laugh, clambering to her feet weakly. ‘And that cause is whatever the Harway family wants.’

Hakuno closed her eyes. She didn’t know what to say, what to think. Not anymore.

‘Rin,’ she said finally, stepping forward and opening her eyes to confront the sharp red mark she had smeared against her friend’s face. ‘Tamamo and I are getting married.’

It was there, now she was looking for it. The slight flinch that ran into Rin’s eyes, if not the rest of her body, the way her pupils wandered, as though to avert themselves from Hakuno’s stare. In response, Hakuno found her hands tightening on Rin’s own.

‘You can spend the rest of your life hunting down the Harway family if you want. But you have to tell Tamamo and me, before you pull anything this _stupid_ again. And we’ll help.’ She tilted her head to the side. ‘And I don’t know if I’m cruel to ask...but you’re the only real friend we have here, in this world. I want you to remain that way. Will you stay my friend, Tohsaka Rin? Even if you don’t need to? ’

Rin stared at her.

‘But bear in mind,’ Hakuno swiftly continued. ‘That even if your answer’s no, I’m still gonna chase you down anyway. To the end of the earth itself, if I need you. Just to make sure you’re still alive.’

Rin’s eyes watered. And then she’d nodded, looking as though she was trying to swallow down something thick in her throat.

Hakuno couldn’t help but wonder how long it’d been since Rin had had someone to tell her that they’d honestly loved her. Enough to defy the world itself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nothing more but an epilogue to go now, folks.


	7. Unfurled and Awake

 

Tamamo was probably the only person left in the world with the magic to defy nature itself. Her hands rose, a month after Rin had promised to stay in touch, as paper talismans rose round her in a strange orbit, fire and ice spat out on either side.

Hakuno was very careful to keep her distance, at least eight steps back; but she couldn’t help but feel wistful as she watched the elements twirl and curdle against each other. She wasn’t sure if it was a power that humanity deserved. But some small part of her, the lost, lonely girl who may have read a little too much manga at one point, couldn’t help but feel a slight longing for it. Still, there was something awe-inspiring about being one of the few humans left alive who had ever actually _witnessed_ magic in front of her, something that didn’t require the sparkling physics of a virtual environment to take place in. So she bit back her small jealously and let her smile lift her mouth, serving as encouragement for Tamamo’s eager eyes.

A frisson of ice and a teardrop curl of flame played before her face, growing and then dying like the drooping petals of a flower, each killed by the opposing heat or chill. It was a fierce battle, one that bloomed round the dancing movements of Tamamo’s hands in faltering, yet graceful curves, as though she was carving large letters into the air and purposefully writing out words doomed to die with a cruel, flirtatious smile.  And distantly, as though willed into being by this slight quirk of her mouth, a line of grey appeared along the horizon. Fluffy and blurred, the streak soon bundled itself up and arranged itself into a potent rain cloud. And yet the sun overhead remained undeterred.

Tamamo grinned and the talismans charred to a crisp, an eerie green light illuminating their edges as they fell and crumbled away. She turned to Hakuno, who was waiting patiently beyond the line of fire and extended her hand. Despite the flurry of magic and the wet spice of it hanging in the air, her white kimono was spotless. And so Hakuno smiled, stepping forwards to knot her fingers within Tamamo's own,  the scent of magic enthusing her. For a moment, she was living in a fairytale.

The feeling continued as they walked together, through the reeds, the irises, the month of June helping to usher their purple and whites into full bloom. A few metres away a turtle snapped at the air and a fish plopped out of sight.

‘Such beautiful flowers,’ Tamamo sighed. ‘I see why _Empress_ Shōken loved them so.’

There was a spell of silence over the garden, no other people in view. The magic felt heavy in the air, keeping them away; Hakuno could feel it pressing down on them, letting her lungs lift and breathe in air that seemed to fizzle on its way down to her throat. She frowned and concentrated on her feet, hoping that more mundane concerns, like praying that the trim of her own white kimono would not hang too low and brush against the ground, would keep her sane.

‘You know, I never thought you would want a quiet affair,' she found herself saying. Words, yes, that was it, words would keep her here, present, in this moment with Tamamo. 'I pictured you wanting all the pomp and grandeur I once foolishly promised.’

Tamamo smiled. ‘I could have had that once, if I had managed to successfully wed the man I loved. But age has made me wise, and made my tastes mellow.’

A bunch of foxes swam into view, surfacing from out of the trees and bushes accosting the side of the path. They had all manner of paper lanterns clutched between the teeth, ghostly blue light flicking out from between the floral print.

Hakuno gave Tamamo a look.

‘Hush,’ the bride told her, giving her wrist a gentle pinch. ‘This is far tamer than what you should expect of me.’

The rain began to fall, brushed out from the drifting cloud at the right angle, just enough to form a rainbow as the sun continued to shine. It was light and gentle, and the first real indication that it was there, were the small plink-plink sounds that drifted out over the tsuno-kakushi Hakuno's head was trapped inside.

Oh well, she thought, at least it made for a nice umbrella.

She took a breath, lips curling at the idea of being married under a proper sun-shower. How fitting it all was. And how like Tamamo to purposefully rustle up one, just for today. It truly would be a kitsune’s wedding.

The path widened, giving way to the small shrine where Rin was waiting, a proud look on her face beside one of the few Shinto priests uncanny enough not to be phased by a bunch of foxes walking in single file like a gaundy procession. He even looked amused and Hakuno spared a thought for what else he must have witnessed in his life to make him seem so unflappable.

Though that dark look in his eye, the way his hair was cut, sloping over his forehead in two equal divisions...

Hakuno shook herself and escaped the chill of recognition. So what if he bore more than a passing resemble to Kotomine? They were out here, now, in the real world. Kotomine, wherever he was, was not.

And besides, there was no reason _not_ to trust Rin’s judgement.

She squeezed Tamamo’s hand. ‘Ready?’

Tamamo, laughed, caught her up inside an enthusiastic hug. ‘I’ve been ready for centuries!’

I, even less so, thought Hakuno. Only decades for me. Mere minutes compared to you and all you’ve been.

Hakuno looked out, at the green of the trees and grass, at the brown of the shrine and the white of the dresses she and Tamamo were stuck inside. She saw the pain in Rin’s eyes and the yellow fall of her hair, now longer but not as long as she wanted it to be. It would take time, just as it would for Rin’s feelings to fade. Still, she had come. It was more than Hakuno had hoped for.

She looked at Tamamo at the pink flush of her face, at the ginger-rose of her hair, so rough and exciting compared to Hakuno’s own. And the yellow of her eyes barely a blink away from her own.

‘You ready?’ her soon-to-be-wife asked with a grin. ‘Ready for me to spend the rest of our mortal lives serving and entertaining you? Never fear! I will chase boredom away with each hearty exhalation of my joy!’

Yes, Hakuno thought. I’ve spent so much of my life asleep. Now it’s time to spend the rest of it awake.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have actually been lucky enough to go to the Yoyogi Imperial Garden next to the Meiji shrine in June; just the right time of year to see those lovely irises bloom. So I can understand Tamamo’s appreciation here. Also, Tamamo probably would enjoy something that gave a Japanese empress such pleasure in her lifetime.
> 
> Hopefully, this small piece will go some way to appeasing other Hakuno/Tamamo fans, like me. :)


End file.
